The Headmaster Ritual: The Importance of Management for School Outcomes

Published date01 October 2016
AuthorAnders Böhlmark,Jonas Vlachos,Erik Grönqvist
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/sjoe.12149
Date01 October 2016
Scand. J. of Economics 118(4), 912–940, 2016
DOI: 10.1111/sjoe.12149
The Headmaster Ritual: The Importance
of Management for School Outcomes
Anders B¨
ohlmark
SOFI, Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
anders.bohlmark@sofi.su.se
Erik Gr¨
onqvist
Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy (IFAU), SE-751 20
Uppsala, Sweden
erik.gronqvist@ifau.uu.se
Jonas Vlachos
Stockholm University, and the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), SE-106 91
Stockholm, Sweden
jonas.vlachos@ne.su.se
Abstract
We estimate the impact of individual principals on school outcomes by using panel data that
allow us to track principals over time. We find that individual principals have a substantive
impact on school policies, working conditions, and student outcomes. In particular, students
who attend a school that has a one standard deviation better principal improve their achieve-
ment by between 0.05 and 0.1 standard deviations. Despite rich background information on
principals, it is difficult to characterize successful management, suggesting that innate skills
are central. We find that the scope for discretion is larger among voucher schools and in
areas with school competition.
Keywords: Principals; school management
JEL classification:H4; I21; J45
I. Introduction
The role of school principals largely resembles that of corporate managers.
Principals hire teachers, decide how they are remunerated, provide support
and encouragement for their staff, allocate teachers and students to classes,
organize schedules, make strategic pedagogical decisions, and represent the
school in its contacts with education boards, trade unions, and parents.
We have benefited from comments from Marianne Bertrand, Henrik Cronqvist, Caroline
Hall, Per Johansson, Markus J¨
antti, Jonas Lagerstr¨
om, Andrew Leigh, Erica Lindahl, Peter
McHenry, three anonymous referees, and from seminar participants at IFAU, SOFI, IFN,
EALE/SOLE 2010, and AEA 2011. We acknowledge financial support from IFAU, Riks-
bankens Jubileumsfond, FORTE (grant no. 2013-0645) and the Swedish Research Council.
Correction added on 3rd June 2016, after first online publication: this affiliation has been
corrected.
CThe editors of The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 2015.
A. B¨
ohlmark, E. Gr¨
onqvist, and J. Vlachos 913
In essence, principals provide management in a complex and knowledge-
intensive organization. It is therefore understandable that the leadership by
principals often is viewed as a crucial component for educational success
(e.g., Harris, 2006). This interest in school leadership is reflected in the
academic literature; numerous studies have attempted to assess the influence
of principals on student achievement and related outcomes.1Surveys of this
vast research (e.g., Hallinger and Heck, 1996, 1998; Waters et al., 2003;
Witziers et al., 2003; Leithwood et al., 2004) all voice the concern, how-
ever, that previous studies are mainly of cross-sectional, non-experimental
design.
In this paper, we overcome many of the problems in the previous lit-
erature by using a principal–school panel strategy to estimate the impact
of principals on three types of outcomes: (i) school-level student achieve-
ment; (ii) working environment; (iii) strategic school choices.2We use
Swedish register data to construct a principal–school panel data set cover-
ing all Swedish compulsory schools 1996–2008, which allows us to track
individual principals as they move across schools. We regress school-level
outcomes on year and school fixed effects, a rich set of time-varying school
and student characteristics, and a vector of principal fixed effects. The es-
timates of principal effects give us the entire distribution of principals’
influence on school-level outcomes, having controlled for observable and
unobservable school heterogeneity.
Our paper is closely related to four concurrent papers that estimate
principal fixed effects on student achievement utilizing principal switches.
Branch et al. (2012) focus on heterogeneities across schools and find that
principals have a larger impact on schools with a worse socioeconomic
gradient. Coelli and Green (2012) find that the impact of a principal in-
creases with tenure while Dhuey and Smith (2014) find no effect of tenure.
Grissom et al. (2015) compare estimated principal effects to external per-
formance assessments (e.g., school district evaluations).
The contribution of our paper is as follows. (i) We use a larger set
of outcomes – from different domains of principal influence – from all
Swedish compulsory schools. (ii) We relate the different sets of principal
fixed effects to each other and to very detailed data on principal character-
istics, thus trying to characterize successful principals. (iii) We relate the
distribution of principal effects to different institutional features, assessing
where principals have the largest impact.
1Recent work has focused on the importance of management: using principal self-assessment,
Grissom and Loeb (2011) find that organizational management skills are related to growth
in school grades, and Horng et al. (2010) find that time spent on organizational management
activities is associated with positive school outcomes.
2Loeb et al. (2012) stress the importance of recruiting and retaining good teachers, which
suggests that there is scope for good leadership in these dimensions.
CThe editors of The Scandinavian Journal of Economics 2015.

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